Swiss Life Continues to Orientate to Advice and Real Estate Asset Management Fees

The development of Swiss Life has been hampered over the years due to the structure of a long-term savings market that has been overshadowed by low and declining Swiss government bond yields. However, Swiss is an evolving business that increasingly generates earnings from fees. Of its three income sources, fees have grown by close to 25 percentage points over the last 10 years. Sources of fees stretch across advice and asset management and Swiss Life is a slightly different business. Its advisory business is one of the strongest in Europe and provides high-quality advice to wealthy individuals. Advisors tend to take their time and focus on specific characteristics and circumstances of each client and develop tailored goals and suggest products to meet their needs. We think Swiss has extended this to most core markets beyond domestic, focusing on key wealth transfer markets and Germany. The emphasis is on helping customers build enough wealth to live life resolutely. More recently the business has built on core and market-leading domestic BVG autonomous and semiautonomous solutions with the acquisition of ElipsLife from Swiss Re.